Variants
by OnTheImportanceOfLungs
Summary: Sit upon the Throne of the Eight Trigrams, Uzumaki Naruto, and turn back the clock. You are the first amongst equals, only the first of eight. And when your strength burns as brightly as your will, may your wishes be fulfilled. But remember, do remember, they too dream of worlds. Pray they dream with you.
1. Seal 1

Author's Note: Oh hey, is this my new story? Well, I guess it is, after all!

Naruto, straight up Naruto, with some recycled ideas that took thematic influence from Buddhism (just like Kishimoto, guys!). This is a fic I've always wanted to write, since I smiled and danced and jumped at ShaperV's Time Braid and cringed at Perfect Lionheart's Chunin Exam Day.

Despite the whole time travel thing, this will probably be more tame in terms of action compared to my other fics. It's meant to be a showcase of how much I love the characters of this series as much as a story that grips and all. So, yay, LET US INTO THE BEGINNING.

Note: This is written from multiple first person perspectives. If you're confused or if there's a bunch of psychobabble, it's a mirror of what the current protagonist's state of mind. Some characters are relatively normal. Some are… not.

Disclaimer: Technically, if you post on ffn, you're abiding by a sitewide disclaimer in the ToS, but people (and me) like putting this here because it comes from a time before ffn - when people dropped fics on their blogs and stuff and they needed more disclaimers than what the blogging website had already put up. So, uh, I don't own Naruto, but you knew that already :P

**Variants**

by Lungs

Seal 1: I Once Was A Kid

I threw the kunai back at him with all the force I could muster and watched it pass through the bark in slow motion. It was all happening in my head anyway - I had barely released the clump of iron, but I had thrown so many that I knew the rotting wood of the tree would pose just enough resistance to give it a fifteen degree twist. The kunai now passed through the tree, appropriately bent, sailed through the window with a sharp snapping sound of displaced air and buried itself into one of the two _ronin_'s throats.

There was a spray of red, most likely showering everyone from the man's partner to the little boy, Inari, and his mother, Tsunami, in his blood. My fingers twisted into a quick handseal and an imitation of me, from his spiky blond locks to the orange jumpsuit that I wore for old time's sake, suddenly appeared. Without waiting for him to greet me as shadow clones normally did, I grabbed him by the arm, pushed the heavy, blue essence of my living, my existence, into my hand and threw him through the window and took off running.

Sasuke was waiting.

I had an old enemy and an old friend to kill.

They were Zabuza, the Demon of the Mist, and his assistant, Haku, complete opposites in every way.

_Unworthy._

I crushed the voice, my voice. This was not the time. I was still Naruto, still _me_. And even if the voice was a mere facet of my personality, as difficult and stubborn as I knew I was, I could still control it.

_Can you?_

I ignored me. I continued to run. He only spoke to me in moments of crisis anyway and he didn't understand me like I understood myself. I was most levelheaded during a crisis and this was the crisis.

No more chakra usage. I was going to finish this mission as if I were Lee - with nothing but my fists, because that's where my heart and my soul existed. I was an avatar of battle.

I_ am the avatar of battle, Naruto_.

How do you destroy a mirror with your bare hands? That was the question I asked myself when I stood on that fateful bridge, the one that was once named after me. Do you put your fist through it? Do you force it to show you so much truth that it could do nothing but shatter? Do you break the person forcing you to confront yourself?

Without a second set of thoughts, I jumped into the fray as Sasuke's dark eyes flashed desperate and resigned in time.

_Tick tick._

I let some senbon hit me in nonlethal places and felt my left arm go numb, but I ripped them out quickly. Shinobi were meant to bleed, and bleed I did, a true, true red.

I was alive.

More senbon, some of hardy steel and some of deceptively soft looking ice, jetted through the air. These I dodged, but Sasuke could barely see them. I did not push him out of the way and in the last moment, he finished his handseals to a Katon jutsu and a burst of flame bloomed from his mouth, vaporizing the ice and sending molten steel everywhere.

Another barrage, from behind us. Sasuke twisted around and let loose a slightly less effective burst of flame.

"Dobe," he bit out, winded from the long exhalations of chakra fire.

"Sasuke," I responded gently, because I could not bring myself to pretend, not in the heat of the battle. I was older, more responsible, more powerful, everything he wanted to be in this very moment and even if I couldn't let him know, I couldn't be the Naruto he wished I were. I was not a friendly competitor anymore, and even if he didn't know it then, his very body felt the difference. "We have to win."

I thought vaguely of the First and his oft quoted words to Uchiha Madara, "You must right your wrongs or you shall let your wrongs write you."

Senbon came in from every direction and I methodically knocked one after another away.

His face showed no emotion as he danced around me blocking some of the incoming missiles. His movements had changed.

"Sharingan?" I knew this to be true, I knew he would manifest it here, at last. This was the starting point of his descent. I had let it happen to him, with savage glee and rotten pity, rather than pluck out his eyes in the dead of night. A flick of my hand redirected a senbon with more speed than he could comprehend, especially with his back turned, into the nape of his neck and he was all but dead to the world.

The friend in the mirror looked confused and this was when I broke him. My fist, in a pathetic imitation of the more refined Gouken of Konoha, pushed through a mirror and into the other boy's neck, snapping it.

The mirrors melted, one after another, as he took his last breaths.

I wish I were sorry. I would have given anything to be sorry, but nothing I could give would have been enough to bring the sorrow back into my heart, to wash the stain from my soul.

Several hundred meters away, Sharingan no Kakashi and Momochi Zabuza paused their fight, a delicate and brutal dance of water clones and mud torrents, to stare at me, standing over the still forms of their favorite students.

_Kitsune_.

I dropped to my knees and began to weep, a sound horrible to even my own ears. "S-sasuke!" My scream of grief ripped through the mist. I turned my back to the pair in the distance and for just a second, _he_ took over the features in my face. It changed into a mockery of sadness, a strange, alien, sensuous grin that I had seen in the mirror and hated. The pleasure of a job done to perfection welled up within it.

Kakashi was angry, which meant I wouldn't have to get my hands dirty. There was a dramatic rise in his chakra, his spirit, his will to fight. He thought Sasuke was dead, and he did what all Konoha nin did when they believed their comrades and students compromised. He killed.

_Stronger than he could have been otherwise_.

In the heat of my victory, I agreed with _him_. The sound of a thousand chirping birds filled the air and Momochi Zabuza saw his fate sealed, sealed in Ox-Rabbit-Monkey as Kakashi's hands flashed, sealed like the Kyuubi in my gut. I could see Kakashi's Sharingan force itself into its third state as the starbursts of lightning chakra filled his world and his movements became more efficient, deadly.

In the split second before his death, Zabuza searched for Haku with his eyes, sweeping over to the fallen bodies, but saw me instead. He saw my grin, saw my victory, saw the fox, and in that frozen moment, I knew he hated me.

Then the moment passed and Kakashi's hand was buried in his chest. He fell forward, but Kakashi pushed off his dead weight with ease. I turned myself back to Sasuke. I heard someone else in the distance, screaming his name, brave enough to stop protecting the man behind our mission.

I ran up to her, sobbing once more and threw myself at her. "I avenged him, Sakura. I avenged him," I begged. I begged for her to believe me and I slid off of her to the ground, my body seizing in regret and pain and _loss_.

_You almost have _me_ convinced_.

I didn't let _him_ have any of me now. Kakashi was certainly better than Sasuke at reading people, especially his students. It came as no surprise to me that he came to me first - I had, after all, lived.

"Naruto. Naruto. It's… It's going to be alright," he lied. I could almost feel him blinking rapidly to chase the tears away as his voice took on a helpless, dead cadence.

"No it won't!" I screamed back at him, not even bothering to look at him. Sobs wracked my body.

"It will, it will," he said with growing horror.

Suddenly, Sakura screamed again and Kakashi looked up. I didn't. I knew it was because the ice had melted upon Haku's death and Sasuke was now moving. My aim had been perfect.

"Naruto, he's alive," Kakashi whispered, but it might have been a roar. I turned to stare at him, my eyes red and spraying tears, responded with a whimper, so full of hope that he almost wished he hadn't said anything, lest nothing could be done for a dying Sasuke.

Kakashi quickly helped me up and the pair of us ran over to Sasuke and knelt at his side.

Sasuke coughed and looked accusingly at us. He grunted and our faces broke into wide grins as he picked himself to his feet and stared at the world with his new eyes.

"The Sharingan," Sakura whispered in awe.

"No fair, Kakashi-sensei. He's going to learn all the cool jutsus now!" I huffed. Somewhere in my head, _he_ roared with laughter. What? He was, if he would live that long!

"How amusing!"

I bit back a groan. It would play out the same way this time around. There would be bandits, numbering in scores. The townspeople of Wave Country would surge to its defense, motivated by the halfhearted words of people with _power_.

_Or you could kill them all. Wet your throat a little. Haku was just an appe-_

I was too bloodthirsty, and even if I barely ever let it cloud my judgment, it probably showed on my face for just a moment. Kakashi was looking at me with worry.

"They got Haku killed. I had to kill him to save Sasuke. They wanted us dead." Shinobi logic was mostly unsaid - the logic of Konoha nin was the worst of all. But Kakashi understood.

"I don't believe we have to fight them, Naruto." Kakashi gestured at the civilians.

I bit my lip, pretending to be nervous. "What if they fight back?"

"I don't think so." Sure enough, the bandits were getting back on their boats as quickly as possible.

_You can kill them all, even Kakashi. It would be glorious_.

That was it. I had enough. I turned away from the group again and made a pair of quick handseals.

It was sloppy, but I wanted it to be. That way, it didn't use quite as much chakra, and Kakashi would barely notice. It would almost seem as if I had just flared my chakra for a moment.

The Two Skies Seal was one that promoted mental focus - designed with nothing in mind but cramming for exams, which the higher level shinobi of the leaf took often to prove their continuous skill. Of course, there wasn't much time to study, as missions often resulted in injuries, civilian prostitution, gambling and sake, so a brilliant ninja had invented it to force mental focus. It was quickly discovered that there was nothing better than a quick Two Skies Seal to turn off hallucinations from the mushrooms that grew on the path up to the mountain that overlooked Konoha…

My thoughts trailed off until I finally touched my forehead and the telltale spot of blood slowly diffused until it turned my face a slightly rosy shade.

"S-sakura-chan. Will you go on a date with me?"

She was too tired to do anything but groan and look away.

I was feeling better already. Good enough to weigh the destruction of Sasuke's eyes against allowing him to choose his own path.

After several minutes of contemplation, I pretended to pass out and let Kakashi carry me back to the client's house, where I lay in bed until I did, in fact, fall asleep


	2. Split 1

Author's Note: Somewhat lukewarm response. Then again, I've never really, really written in non-crossover parts of the fandom before. Hopefully the writing of this chapter will change that! I have big plans and all.

Don't flip out when you read this chapter. I'm saying this because I nearly flipped out when I wrote it.

This will definitely be a ton darker than I thought it would be.

Disclaimer: All I want to do is bring you on a journey with me. Yeah, sure, you shouldn't go off with strangers and all. Bah.

**Variants**

by Lungs

Split 1: Long Hair

I came back to this day because I knew he had gone further, had changed something. I came back because I couldn't ruin his excitement or sacrifice my own. But if I really had to choose, I would do anything for him.

My name is Hurano Sakura and there is nothing more important to me than the three boys on my team. There, that was the first time I actively said it aloud since arriving.

I used to do it every night, to remind myself, when they all went rotten in their own ways and then redeemed themselves.

I am the second victim of the Eight Trigrams, the revelation of our immortality, of our insignificant worth in the face of others, in the face of rebirth.

I am Sakura of the Earth. I am Sakura who blooms in the winter.

Naruto, _my_ Naruto, shouldn't have been surprised when I caught his lazy, barely competent foot sailing through the air, not taking me seriously, when I had changed so fundamentally in the last three seconds.

I snapped his leg in half. _When Hyoton meets the Great Fireball…_

Of course, Naruto had been completely unprepared. We had come back from the Wave mission, where he had found his will to protect those close to him, just a day ago, after all. Haven't I?

And my hair drifts ever so slightly over my face as Kakashi and Sasuke cry out in alarm. I put on my best innocent little girl act and squeak, only half pretending, "Help me, Sasuke-kun!"

Naruto is glaring at me because Kakashi and Sasuke are staring the wrong way. Even in our pasts, Naruto never wanted to offend either of them. He didn't care much for me though.

Our sensei turns and his face, oh-so-good-at-deception, melts into the image of surprised pain.

"Okay, let's get Naruto to the hospital," Kakashi says cheerfully. Sasuke grunts, but helps Kakashi pick Naruto up and the silver-haired man disappears in a whirl of leaves.

Sasuke and I are alone now and the setting sun is painting the sky as pink as my hair. The trees look vaguely ominous and amazingly safe. The trees are _home_, are Senju, are Shodai. The boy next to me is _ninja_, is Uchiha, is… Sasuke.

He is not Madara. He will never be Madara. From the jaws of the abyss, he _did_ find redemption.

This wasn't _my_ Sasuke though, so I walked off quickly and quietly in the direction of the hospital.

When I finally arrived at Naruto's bedside, Kakashi had already gone. Naruto was very clearly unharmed and smirking at me.

"You." We both said it at the same time and despite himself, Naruto _giggled_. I was scared.

"How are you, Inner?"

"Don't call me that. I am _Sakura_."

Naruto grinned, feral and ferocious and _fox_. My heart skipped a beat. I wasn't the girl he loved.

"You're a pale imitation of her desires, her subconscious, Inner."

I felt like crying, felt like telling him that I loved him, that I loved Sasuke and Kakashi, that he was hurting me, hurting me so much, but I just glared.

"The Sakura I knew released herself from the Cycle a long time ago. She _ascended_. There's nothing but you, you stubborn…"

I couldn't let him. I couldn't. My first flew towards him, ripping through the air so quickly that my hands, so used to dainty things in these formative years, ripped open and splattered him with blood even as his block drove him into the bed.

"You can't beat me, Inner. Not even Sakura could, in the end. I had to let her."

He was goading me and I was falling for it. My hand glowed green for a moment, healing the damage as I pounced on him, ready to hit him with every single little part of my body.

"If you can't beat them, rape them?"

I growled at him and very suddenly, he flipped me over and pinned me down to the bed.

"I'm not going to hurt you. You still wear her face. And she is my heaven. She is my hell. She is my _everything_." His eyes glowed blood-orange as he pushed against me even harder. The Two Skies Seal fizzled away, glowing once on his forehead and then disappearing. He scowled and reapplied it quickly.

"Are you afraid of your Inner, Naruto?" I was sitting beside him now, my back to his shoulder, my blood staining his jacket. "You shouldn't be. You're a good man, even if you don't realize it."

Naruto shook his head emphatically but I knew he was.

I stood quickly as the door opened and Sasuke walked in.

"Where did you go, Sasuke-kun?"

"To get changed." He was still so very curt. He might not be, soon. He might be crazy. Like me. Like Naruto.

At that moment, Kakashi dropped into the room and smiled behind his mask. "Now, are we ready to go back to the training field?"

While Kakashi walked ahead and Sasuke stared at the ground sullenly on their way back, I quickly signed in General ANBU 'Find me after training' and to my surprise, Naruto nodded at me.

We continued to spar and walk up and down trees for several hours before Kakashi dismissed us. It was nice to have so much time to ourselves, so much time to think about just anything that crossed my mind.

I walked off towards the direction of my home and my parents, so distant to me now that I barely knew how to react to them.

But I didn't have to worry about that confrontation yet, because Naruto was lounging around the intersection a street away. I walked up to him and he nodded gloomily as I stuck my finger through his chest and he disappeared with a puff of smoke. _Kage Bunshin_. He never stopped loving the first techniques he learned.

In several minutes, Naruto had appeared yet again.

"Training area?" he said quietly and we walked off in silence. If anyone had seen us and cared enough to take a second look, they wouldn't have believed we were walking together. My very footsteps were taut with anticipation and a slight helping of fear, while Naruto seemed to be jaunty and upbeat. As his personality slowly changed and he embraced the fox, he had become very hard to read.

Why do I always feel invisible? For just a moment he had noticed me, then I had faded out of his vision. He didn't see Sakura. He saw Inner.

We didn't spar, we dueled. It was a clash of our personalities. He saw nothing but his fists and I saw nothing but him. He was Naruto.

Once upon a time, I had overlooked him, thought that he was useless, and I had told Outer that he was a sideshow, someone for Sasuke to squash like a bug.

A fist sank into my chest and split my sternum in half. I pushed myself out of the way of a crescent kick, coming down harder than any moon could and my bones knit themselves. I coughed once and I was fine.

"You don't fight like her. You're too… wild," he decided. "You can't take advantage of _any_ of my openings."

Fist hit fist and my knee blocked his.

"She was the perfect blend of impulse and analysis."

He broke my neck with his next strike and I crumpled to the ground. I snapped it back into place with my hands and stood up quickly, blocking another strike.

"You are inferior."

He got behind me, somehow, and my back snapped in four places. I fell forward and he tried to follow through, but my forehead slammed into his Achilles tendon and knocked him to the ground. I stood up and cracked my back a little.

"You're living on borrowed techniques."

A fist slammed into my liver and it blew out of my back in gory red and brown chunks.

"Borrowed dedication."

His elbow collapsed my left lung.

"Borrowed _time_."

He fell on my stomach and drove his knee straight through, into the dark earth. He stood and looked down at his handiwork as I struggled to my feet.

We paused for nearly fifteen seconds. "Are you ready to start again?" he asked me, almost gently. He couldn't stand seeing the face of his first love in pain.

"Just kill me, Naruto. Just kill me. It's what you want, don't you?"

He shook his head. He was openly crying now.

"You're mad, Naruto. _Crazy_."

"Like a fox." His eyes flashed remorselessly through his pain. I wasn't sure if he had felt bad at all, to be honest. Outer could read him like a book, even near the very end, but I couldn't.

"How do I fix this?"

"You can't." He grinned through tears and I bit my lip. There was something so very dangerous about someone so animalistic. I _wanted_ him, a mirror of how I _wanted_ my team. Outer had always said that I was too possessive for my own good.

"I can bring her back."

He tore my body in half, growling. "You will _not_ bring her back from paradise. She does not need to feel the pain of living once more."

And he was entirely serious. There were very few people Naruto loved in the end, but he loved Outer. He wanted nothing but the best for her. If I brought Outer back, I would wish I had not lived to regret it.

"I'll say it one last time, Inner. You will hurt her no longer." The moon lit his face in sharp relief and this… this was the man who sat upon the Throne.

"I never wanted to," I begged. He wasn't hurting me anymore, but this was far worse. It's easy to lose yourself in pain. It's hard to match blades with the truth.

He began to walk off, but my voice stopped him. "They're coming. We're all coming."

"I know."

"All of us."

I slowly drew a Yin on the hard earth. Resigned, he nodded and he completed the symbol. How could he not? We were all ritualistic, we were all insane. He could not walk away from the wellspring of his insanity.

I avoided the Throne and I avoided my own Trigram, but I drew the others out on the sides.

"My weakness counterbalances your strength, Naruto."

"Sakura wasn't weak."

Unbidden, my hands shook. "But I am."

That wasn't entirely true, but it was most certainly fair.

"I think Sasuke's going to come next," Naruto decided. "It was always the three of us."

"Who will come after him?"

"The Trigrams need to be counterbalanced, Inner. You are the Yin to my Yang. I believe that you will have an effect on who might appear next."

I paled.

He grinned.

I paled further. "Can you delay it?"

"Why should I do anything for you, Inner?"

I stood, frozen in a curious blend of fear and anticipation.

"My my! Train beyond sundown! And a pair of genin, too!" I recognized the voice immediately. The slithery lilt, recklessness - it was all there. Anko was approaching.

It was at this point when both of us decided that we wanted to go home and we walked from the scene slowly, entertaining the woman as she alternated between cutting us up with her kunai and sharing sticks of dango.

Neither of us were, but I couldn't help but notice that I wasn't the only one caught up in the illusion of being twelve years old again


	3. Beginnings 1

Author's Note: Long awaited. Well, as long as 3 or 4 days is, for this piece of backstory.

Good god, this was hard to write. Outer Sakura will always pose an issue to me, I think, but all of these characters have to be written so that they retain a bit of their original molds and all…

If you haven't noticed by now, my characters have… issues. Hopefully their issues are interesting to you, the reader. :D

This chapter, specifically, is called Beginnings, because it's from before Time Travel shenanigans.

Disclaimer: The day I own Naruto is the day I rollback everyone's seeming knowledge of the Hiraishin.

**Variants**

by Lungs

Beginnings 1: The Samsara

He told me that he was going to buy paper and ink and start a war for me. He told me that I was everything Konoha was to him, the civilian trained by an Academy for the sunny, bright leaves of the great tree. He would be my leader, my reason, my love, my everything, just like I was to him.

As much as I stood as a symbol to him of the Leaf, Sasuke was the roots of this great tree he called his home, the man who lived in the dark and dank, doing things that I would cringe at if they were mentioned to me.

Naruto was the trunk of the tree, with the depth of a thousand rings and the unyielding strength that kept us all alive. We were not flowering plants. We were not tubers. We were the Leaf, the strongest of all the nations.

Yet we had burned. We had lost to the diseases of Uchiha Madara and Orochimaru, to the unerring elements of the Akatsuki. We had been reduced to twenty five strong. There was not a civilian among us any longer.

I'd watched his hands clench and unclench at the bright, green leaves of his childhood being lost. The father and daughter pair at that ramen place he always wanted me and Sasuke to go to with him. At Iruka-sensei from the academy, who I hadn't spoken to in years preceding his death. At all of the rookies, rookies even after we became more powerful than the ANBU, who had lost their lives protecting one another. Only five of twelve remained.

But this was the nature of our pain, our living. This was the Samsara, the cycle of unending _hurt_ that Naruto sought to protect us from.

_You love him!_

Inner has always been a part of me - a piece of personality disorder, perhaps, but someone who was unique. Someone who ensured that I was never alone.

_And you know it!_

I sketched out the Diagrams with a brush, not to seal anything - I didn't have that much chakra anyway. They were curious figures, various lines with two positions - open and closed - which were arranged in an octagonal pattern. I didn't draw the Yin and the Yang but I could envision it, trapped within the confines of the Diagrams. These were the Eight Trigrams. A collection of lines that functioned as the most powerful seal known to our kind. _A skillful binding has no cords or knots yet it cannot be untied_.

The trigrams were smooth and impenetrable, unlike the Cursed Seal of Heaven that Orochimaru gave out to his associates and slaves. There was genius involved in utilizing it, but no cleverness, no little tricks of the trade that seal masters were so well known for.

This was Naruto's seal - both on his belly and in his heart. It locked away his demons, locked away his darkness. He didn't understand it.

There was a loud banging on her door.

"Come in, Ino." Sasuke and Naruto never bothered to knock and everyone else was polite about their attempts to get her attention.

"No, come out, Sakura. There are missing-nin attacking. _Again_."

I sighed. "Anyone important?"

"No."

I let out another sigh and stood, then walked over to the door dutifully and threw it open.

My very best friend from my childhood stared at me for a moment, then nodded. "Mist. Chunin."

Despite myself, I growled. "They're sending Chunin to deal with Konoha's best now? If the Mizukage was still alive…"

"Mei is dead." Our lips set into hard lines.

"Madara…"

Ino didn't respond to that, but instead leapt into the air.

'Konoha' was now on the edge of Fire Country and Wave Country, a stone's throw from the Great Naruto Bridge. There was around ten large wooden structures that could pass for housing - some people lived alone but most people slept with their teammates or what remained of them. The guard changed every night, rather randomly, to the pleasure of the Hokage.

Tonight, it was Ino, who expressed extreme displeasure with our living conditions. Quietly, nearly everyone with water or earth affinities worked on recreating the Mokuton Hijutsu so we could build a village once more and she never stopped.

"Suiton: Joki Boi!" Ino's fingers flashed in the light of the moon through ten handseals… twenty handseals… thirty… forty… I stopped counting. This was a technique that she had observed and recreated.

Out of the water, several meters away, grew a clone of Ino. A short stream of chakra and something else left her body and covered the clone.

"Heat." In a mere moment, I was nearly baked by the smiling clone, who's body temperature had risen to impossible levels.

"Cool." Instantly, all the previous warmth had been sucked away and icicles began forming everywhere. Had the clone grown larger, or was it my imagination?

The clone dashed off to the east and we followed it, running over the water after it. The clone was now a head taller than us and substantially bulkier.

"What is that, exactly?"

"You'll see." Ino smirked at me.

The clone reached the band of Mist chunin quickly and began engaging them in Taijutsu. I was confused. Ino _hated_ Taijutsu. She was clearly more than a match for the chunin, but as a pair of shadowy figures jumped into the fray, a pair that had undoubtedly avoided Ino's cursory glance, I knew Ino's clone had lost already. It may have retained her speed, but it clearly couldn't match her strength.

We watched from the water as the clone fought the jonin, were they? The clone was slowly increasing in size.

"Are you going to crush them to death, Ino-pig?" I muttered good-naturedly.

Ino shook her head.

The clone exploded, turning the pair of jonin and most of the chunin into a bloody mist.

I started in shock and Ino all but roared with laughter.

And then the clone reformed.

"Oh, that's just not fair," I grumbled. "What are the weaknesses?"

"Not telling."

I observed it quietly as the remaining chunin and one more (much more wary) jonin started engaging it from a distance with ninjutsu.

"Fire!" I exclaimed, having discovered exactly what was powering the clone. "There is… your body fat or something in that clone. That's what you sent it with the chakra."

"Yeah, that's what it is," Ino groaned.

The clone picked up speed very suddenly and latched itself onto the jonin in a bear hug.

"Heat."

The clone boiled him alive and dissipated after a series of handseals from Ino. She looked a bit winded, so I personally ran over and crushed a pair of chunin's skulls and dragged the other one to the side of the ocean.

I dunked his head in very suddenly and pulled him out.

"Who sent you?"

The chunin coughed and sputtered. "The M-mizukage."

I let the chunin down and sighed. I really, really didn't have the spirit to torture him for information. "Look, if you don't tell me exactly what your mission parameters are, I'm just going to kill you and be done with it."

The chunin blanched and began talking rather quickly. "The Mizukage ordered the assassination of Uzumaki Naruto, so we brought along our Seal Masters. He told us that Konoha was all but destroyed and to find a day in which there were no Hyuuga-"

"Enough," I said, snapping his neck. "Ino."

She materialized next to me, staring at the dead body with some curiosity. "What did he say?"

"They came with Seal Masters and support nin to assassinate Naruto."

Ino's lips quirked into a smile. "Don't they know who were are? Do you think they've ever cracked open a Bingo Book?"

Like Sarutobi Asuma, her late sensei, Ino always carried around her page from the latest Bingo book.

"One hundred and thirty three million ryo. It's still less than Team Sevens. And Shika's." She chuckled.

We lapsed into a silence and Ino began playing with the dead chunin's fingers, clasping them between hers and smile at him.

"Did we really have to trade our lives, our parents, our sanity, for this? Is this what everyone who finally reaches 'S' class on the Bingo Books give up?"

Ino abruptly snapped several of the chunin's fingers. "They sacrificed themselves so we could live."

I shook my head. "No, I mean, the ones who didn't have a choice. My parents…"

Yamanaka Inochi was a hero who took death by a hundred kunai to ensure Naruto and Sasuke's escape.

My parents had been killed by a stray Katon jutsu to hit my home - I wasn't even sure if it was an enemy who had done it or a comrade who had no sense of surroundings.

"Ever think that we might be able to go back, Ino?"

"Back in… time?" Ino lit one of those filthy cigarettes that Asuma had passed onto the rest of Team Ten. I couldn't complain though. Naruto had destroyed nearly twenty of my opium pipes. We all had to do _something_.

Ino pointed the cigarette at me and I took it between my fingers. The burning end was beautiful, ashes and the color of the setting sun, the sun that set on Konoha. I took a deep pull and nearly coughed a lung up.

"Let's go." Ino smiled at me, vaguely amused.

We walked in silence, my hand in hers, as though we were five once more. Ino had saved me from bullies who picked on me for my weaknesses, my idiosyncrasies nearly twenty years ago. I couldn't save us from the bullies who picked on Konoha, so many years later.

Being the Hokage, Naruto had his own wooden shack - he generally left it to sleep between me and Sasuke, straddling the line between innocent and smutty the way that only he could. But tonight, neither had come to my bed, so undoubtedly, they were passed out sitting across from one another, on Naruto's desk, studying some sort of map or going over plans.

Ino pushed the door open and, true to my predictions, Sasuke was leaned over the desk, the left side of his face pressed against a pair of hastily unfurled scrolls, clutching a bottle of sake he had undoubtedly pried out of Naruto's hands by force. Naruto's head was against the back wall and his chair was tilted in an impossible angle - only a ninja would have the balance to sit in it during its current state.

I shared a smile with Ino and we shook Sasuke up, then Naruto.

"Whatgoingwhyhereunghh-" Sasuke was so cute when he was waking. Naruto, though, woke without a word and cracked open a bottle of sake, then downed half of it in a monster gulp. His nose twitched.

"Did you smoke one of Ino's cigarettes?" His eyes pierced mine. I turned faintly red. "Ye shouldn't do that, it's bad for you." His speech was on the verge of slurring, indicating that he'd been drinking enough to put my late sensei into a grave.

"He's drunk." Sasuke was Sasuke again. Despite everything, things seemed to be looking up


	4. Kaleidoscope 1

Author's Note: Next up~ Damn, this fic is so much fun to write, you don't even know. Every crazy person I know, everything that I've done over the years that I regret, every little thing I've read about the scary world… it's all represented some way in this fic. And I have a long, long way to go. The golden apple of redemption still looms…

Also, guess who the most normal one is? :D Ironyyyyyy.

This chapter title is not a nod to my other fic. It really isn't.

Disclaimer: If I were Kishimoto, I'd put my ffn author profile link on random things so that attentive readers of the manga would be able to see it on, say, the Ninja Memorial Stone or something and be like "oh wow, I think I should visit that website". And then I'd get tons of hits and reviews. Yeah.

**Variants**

by Lungs

Kaleidoscope 1

I always had the greatest advantage (other than Kakashi-sensei, of course), when I woke up in my body. Naruto had no chakra control, Sakura had no chakra, and other people lacked this or that.

But I had already pushed my body, not to exhaustion, but close, when I woke. The Mangekyo Sharingan was tied to my spirit and not to my body.

I feel bad. I've always had it easy compared to Naruto.

But Naruto is exponentially more productive than I am. And he relies on Taijutsu often anyway.

I don't think Orochimaru expected me to suddenly wake up and grab him by the neck as he attacked to put the Cursed Seal of Heaven on me.

He was most vulnerable when he relied on the technique - it was his greatest moment of weakness and now my eyes had morphed to reflect a world beyond his comprehension.

"Ungh!"

Watching the Snake Sannin gasp is fantastic.

"Sasuke!" Sakura shouted.

I crushed the Snake's windpipe and threw him to the ground like a broken toy. He wasn't dead, but I wouldn't, couldn't use the black flames of Amaterasu just yet. I didn't quite have either the chakra capacity or the control for that. He would get away this time. At least I told myself that.

_I don't want to cycle love, recycle revenge_.

There was always something strange about Sakura when we moved through time together. It's almost as though something was _missing _from her.

I watched as Orochimaru's body vanished into the ground and he disappeared.

And then, there was _strength_ in the clearing.

"Naruto."

He smiled at me and sauntered up to me.

"Naruto," I repeated.

His hands shot out to mutilate me, but I blocked it easily. If I had been the original, the younger boy, I would have died.

"Naruto," I repeated again.

"Mine." He sounded feral.

"You wish," I snapped back, but despite myself, I smiled. There were three of us now.

In his other hand, he held a scroll of heaven. Sakura waved its counterpart at me.

"Well, I don't think there's a need to pretend any longer in front of one another," I decided, and I grabbed both of them by the nape of the neck. "_Kamui_."

We were sucked into nothingness and spat out several hundred meters from the tower in the middle of Training Ground 44.

Instantly, a spooked tiger jumped at me, but Naruto collapsed it with a strong kick to the side of its head.

We walked, flanking Sakura, to the tower and threw open the door.

"There's no one in here?" Naruto scratched the back of his head, a tick he had never rid himself of.

Sakura frowned.

"We have to open the scroll. Your memories are horrid," I said quietly.

And we did.

There was a puff of smoke which sent Sakura into a coughing fit. She glared at the chunin that had materialized.

"Congratulations!" the chunin announced, with much fanfare. Naruto smiled widely at him. Sakura continued to glare. I grunted, almost involuntarily.

"Oh, you genin are so cute!" he exclaimed. Naruto's smile slipped a little and Sakura's glare strengthened. I grunted, quite voluntarily.

There was nearly a day before the other teams would show up, but there were sleeping arrangements in the tower. I wasn't used to sleeping alone, so when it turned dark I snuck out the window, walked along the edge of the tower and jumped into Sakura's room.

Then I saw red.

"Put. The. Pipe. Down."

Sakura slowly rolled a little ball of black paste in her hand and looked up at me, then smiled stupidly.

She did put the pipe down on her bed, but she also began packing it.

"Sasuke-kun," she droned happily. "Why are you…" she giggled a little. "Angry," she finished.

"Don't play dumb." I strode over to her and ripped the pipe out of her hand.

"Give it back!" She smiled stupidly. "If you give it back," she whispered, as though she was telling me a secret, "I might…" She began to slowly remove her red dress. Her long, angelic, pink hair pooled about her face as she leaned back onto the bed.

I made a point of chucking the pipe out the window from whence I came.

She pouted.

I couldn't help it. I really, really couldn't help it. I gave in. A chakra string left the tip of my forefinger and retracted the pipe.

"You can't do this anymore, Sakura." I blinked at her.

"And you have to be less weak-willed," said Naruto from the window.

I cursed under my breath. In an instant, he pinned me to the floor, pulled the pipe out of my hand, threw it back out the window and zapped it with a Raiton jutsu, destroying it in a cloud of smoke.

I bet the birds surrounding were quite happy about the occurrence.

"Naruto!" Sakura screamed. I immediately clamped my hand over her mouth, but the damage was done. We both leapt out of the window, clung to the side of the building and jumped back into our rooms.

I heard the sound of Naruto's door opening down the hall and the muffled sound of someone I didn't recall.

I, too, grabbed the handle of my door and walked outside.

"I was trying to sleep," I spat.

The chunin, not the one who greeted us but a proctor of some sort nonetheless, turned his gaze to me. Naruto smiled victoriously.

"I'm going back to bed." I slammed the door shut, extra hard, and the chunin walked away, Sakura forgotten. I threw myself out the window again and jumped into her room once more.

"You can't do that," I grumbled at Sakura.

She nodded at me. "I'm not high anymore," she groaned.

"You should _never_ be. That stuff kills." Naruto had given me my resolve back.

"You like it too. I've seen you," she whispered accusatively. I knew I had turned a faint shade of pink.

"Not often. Not unless someone's died," I whispered back. "Don't…"

"I won't tell him."

I slipped into her bed and put my head against her stomach.

"Sa-su-ke," she drawled.

"Go to sleep," I commanded, and she shut her eyes.

I felt Naruto join us several minutes later and in minutes, we were all asleep.

As usual, Naruto woke first.

He shook us awake at dawn much to my annoyance.

"I was only going to have a little, yesterday." Sakura glared at Naruto and he looked back with an expression I didn't quite comprehend.

The other teams had probably woken before us by several hours and were most likely making a final push for their scrolls.

"Hey, is there breakfast?" I suddenly asked.

Sakura rolled her eyes at me. "No. We left all our stuff at the spot you teleported us from."

"Why didn't you tell me yesterday, when I could have picked it in just a second?"

"She wanted to get here as soon as possible so she could smoke." There was a current of bitterness in Naruto's tone. Sure, he would have sounded matter-of-fact and even cheerful to anyone else, but he couldn't hide anything from _me_.

"Are we fighting today?" Naruto grinned. In his head, he was undoubtedly calculating how to win while showing the least amount of ability possible.

"The Sandaime, from our previous trips, he gets suspicious when our footwork is good. We might be able to fake genin, or even chunin, level punches easily and even fool him, but your taijutsu stances are impeccable," Sakura said.

"So we should just walk clumsily, right?" Naruto queried.

"Yeah. But if the Sandaime looks away, you should end the fight quickly. Unless Kakashi watches with his Sharingan, or Maito Gai pays a ton of attention, they won't notice."

"You're the best, Sakura-chan!" Naruto bellowed. I winced.

While Naruto had grown somewhat disillusioned about the old man through the trips, the opposite effect had occurred for me.

Naruto hated his inability to make his own decisions because, comparatively, Tsunade's fist was of iron, tempered in the silk glove of the Senju princess. The Sandaime bent like a willow tree in the wind to his old friends, to clan heads he thought he was too old to offend.

But I saw a man who simply wanted peace, who was fine with some things going wrong as long as he kept everyone safe. He was the God of Shinobi because he cared and had the power to back it up. It was almost as though I had imbibed a large portion of Naruto's need to protect everyone, while he had shed it like a snakeskin.

I watched as the hours passed and Naruto socialized with the people who dragged themselves into the tower, bruised and dirty.

Quite a few teams had made it this time because we hadn't found anyone but Orochimaru and Naruto had stolen a scroll rather than fought for it.

"Nine teams have passed!" declared Gekko Hayate, amid a series of long coughs. The Third gave a speech. I zoned out. I really couldn't help it, as I'd heard the same speech several times already.

"… we'll be having preliminaries," Hayate finished. "Draw straws!"

I walked over and dunked my hand into a bag and pulled out my opponent, then wordlessly got back into place.

"Our first round will be Uzumaki Naruto and Abumi Zaku!"

Well, that hadn't happened before. They usually paired Naruto with Kiba. It was almost as if it were rigged.

I watched the Hokage very carefully and he gave a steely nod to the examiners. Then my eyes wandered over to Sakura, who was smirking. She waved the 'straw', a strip of paper with a number on it at me and a little spark jumped in her hand.

I stared at my paper intently and then at the bag. It seemed as though she had used some sort of Raiton jutsu to disrupt the chakra in the back. I would have flashed my Sharingan, but that was just bad manners.

"Begin!"

Snake, Rabbit, Horse, Boar. An activation of some sort, then. The boy, Zaku, raised his hands at Naruto and a burst of air disrupted the light in front of him.

Ah, it was some sort of wind cannon, undoubtedly a low priority experiment by the Snake Sannin.

A thin layer of dirt rose to intercept it and it crumbled away into dust.

Naruto took several steps forward, stumbling over the displaced dirt. I'd seen him walk aimlessly on quicksand before. This was clearly his response to Sakura's plan.

The Hokage frowned. Damn it, Naruto was laying it on a bit thick - the Doton jutsu he'd just used was supposed to be the product of three handseals, but he had left one out, possibly from forgetfulness.

Another blast of air came as the boy retreated, and this time, Naruto jumped through the crumbling wall of dirt and landed next to the boy and backhanded him into a wall.

Good, there was no chakra in the strike. The boy was just slow and terrible at rolling with the hits.

Naruto ran over to him and put a kunai against his neck quickly.

"Winner, Uzumaki Naruto!"

Naruto did a strange dance and pumped his fist into the air in celebration and somewhere from the sidelines, a bunch of people muttered. Kiba shouted at him, telling him to "quit embarrassing Konoha!" The Hokage smiled.

One of three.

There were several more quick battles and some slow battles. I found that fiddling with my fingernails and daydreaming about times long past was a better use of my time than actually watching them.

"Our seventh round will be Haruno Sakura and Inuzaka Kiba!"

My eyes snapped upwards.

"Begin!"

How I loved watching Naruto and Sakura fight. They were so very different. The strength of a tree's trunk and the grace of a dancing leaf. When we fought together, we were Konoha…

We could take the world on.

Sakura punched Akamaru in the face weakly, knocking him off to the side. She seemed to be following her advice in a different way - she wasn't stumbling, but she was slowly giving ground and her steps jolted against the arena floor, imitating loss of willpower.

Then she looked down - I knew her eyes had hardened. This was, after all, a show that only Naruto and myself truly appreciated - other people thought she was weak. They thought Kiba would win easily and already I could hear whispers from the other genin, wondering how Sakura had lasted so long.

Naruto's smile looked rather forced, as though he were enduring some hardship. He must have been bored. He never quite learned to deal with boredom.

In an instant, Sakura's arm flopped as she dodged Kiba - I certainly knew it was intentional, but no one else did. She tagged him in the back of the neck and knocked him out. Kiba reverted from some dog imitation made possible by his family jutsu to the boy we sat next to in class.

Sakura wasn't quite as good an actor as Naruto in terms of speech or facial expression, but her body movements were a textbook example of a surprised person.

Even the proctor looked surprised. "Winner, Haruno Sakura!"

"Our eighth round will be Uchiha Sasuke and Yamanaka Ino!"

Oh no. Since we had begun our adventure through time, I had found it… immensely difficult to raise my hand to a comrade. Even after what some of them had become…

The Eight Trigrams… was a curse. It was a curse because it gave us hope, whispered an idea in our ears that we could personally change the currents of Time. I was not ready to give up the journey and Naruto, bless his complexes and complications, would never do so either… But in my heart of hearts, I knew that it was _bad_ for us.

"I can't fight S-sasuke!" the girl shouted.

"Do you forfeit?"

"Well, no, but…"

"Get over here then," the proctor said, coughing once more.

Resigned to her fate, Ino walked over.

"I-I'm not going to go easy on you, Sasuke!"

I nodded.

"If you win, you have to go out with me," she declared. I started at her strange logic. Sure, it couldn't hurt to spend some time with people you knew would turn out to be amazing.

She readied herself into a sloppy taijutsu stance and ran forward.

By the name of Susano'o, she was _terrible_. I blocked several hits easily and knocked her back with a push to her shoulder.

My left foot turned at an incorrect angle.

Good good, it was going fantastic.

I dropped to the ground and blocked several kicks with palm strikes.

Good good, low level Uchiha Interceptor Fist.

I swept out her legs under her quite inefficiently.

Good good, this was going great.

Going… Then, something changed about her.

Oh no.

Oh… no.

_Pray they dream with you, Uzumaki Naruto_. My own words rang in my ears.

She jumped back and formed a strange handseal. I had seen one other person do it - Naruto, when he really, really needed to purify-

Oh. No.

It was done with the thumbs and pinky. _Yin_.

It was shaped carefully into an octagon. _The Diagrams_.

For just a moment, my eyes flashed Sharingan red, only to observe the Hokage's expression. He was frowning very, very deeply now.

This… was the Yin Conversion Seal. Very, very dangerous. Very, very S-rank. This wasn't a thirteen year old Yamanaka Ino.

The chakra she exuded jumped exponentially. Then it jumped exponentially again. And again. And again.

The Hokage was very, very alarmed now.

Naruto landed in the arena next to me and Sakura landed beside him.

"She's here. I knew she'd show up sooner or later," Sakura muttered.

"Suiton: Suiryudan!" she shouted.

Our cover was blown already. Naruto had moved far, far, too quickly for a genin to my side.

"Mangekyo Sharingan!" I spoke the dreaded words.

I don't know who the examiner dreaded more at the moment.

"Uchiha Sasuke," he began, then coughed up a lung for several moments. "You've been dis-"

The tail of the water dragon bullet knocked him out as it charged… towards the crowd of genin who had no idea how to defend themselves from it.

There were screams. The future Kazekage, the boy with rimmed eyes from sleep deprivation, covered himself with sand.

"Kamui!" A dimensional hole swallowed the technique up and dumped it into the (hopefully empty) Forest of Death.

This was not Yamanaka Ino. This was the Alraune of Konoha, that poisonous purple flower who would drug us into endless sleep, a disease at our very roots…

"Go, Ino. Only Naruto has the heart to kill you," I whispered. "But we won't let you hurt him."

Ino giggled and then _exploded_.

"Clone explosion. She was just buying time to escape," Naruto explained.

"The Trigrams have been balanced once more," Sakura intoned.

And in my heart of hearts, I knew that if I hadn't given up on my last excursion after Naruto and Sakura had left me, I would have delayed her coming by a least another year and a half


	5. Swordsmaster 1

Author's Notes: I wonder how many readers are scared off…

Probably a lot, to be honest. This is not a sane fic.

This chapter is probably not what you're expecting. At all.

A tad difficult to write, because I wanted him to have a very, very specific voice. If you find yourself nodding resignedly and smiling once in a while, I've done something right, in my opinion.

Disclaimer: I actually don't own Naruto. But even if I did, this fic, without the ffn ToS, would be a violation of my contract with whatever manga company Kishimoto's signed with, I think.

**Variants**

by Lungs

Swordsmaster 1

It started as a joke amongst us, after I came back.

Kakashi-san was reading one of those trashy Icha Icha novels by the late Toad Sannin. The main character had traveled through time to seduce the woman he loved, but no matter when he found her, he could not convince her to marry him. There was copious amounts of smut about other women, but Icha Icha Time Machine, considered Jiraiya-sama's greatest work amongst other perverts, only allowed the reader to experience the… release of reading about the antics of the main character and the heroine at the end of the book, when he learned that he didn't need the time machine to make her love him.

I thought it was the textbook example of bad fiction, but something about it - not the smut but something else, intrigued Naruto.

It was not fit for a Hyuuga. But this was why I laughed every time. I was the last living Hyuuga.

I was Neji. I was a Caged Bird without a keeper, as everyone, from my smiling cousin Hinata who had stopped stuttering at last to my hated elders who had croaked one by one, was dead.

I didn't care much for my family, though Hinata's death had been a blow. But there was no way I could not leave Konoha after Gai-sensei and my teammates, Lee and Tenten, lost their lives to Hoshigaki Kisame.

I'm sure Naruto understood, when I told him that I could not take being around everyone anymore. My team had, by no means, sustained the greatest loss - after all, I was still alive (while Shino, Kiba, Hinata and Kurenai-san had all lost their lives and Team Eight had all but been erased).

But I had to leave. Naruto, who was shielded from the horror of losing his team - everyone from Kakashi-san to Sakura, both of which had never left Konoha, and Sasuke, who had come back, was accounted for in Team Seven - could not understand, though he could sympathize.

So Naruto signed a waver for unlimited leave, much like the one that had been given to Tsunade-hime before she left all those years ago. If he could find me, and there was a scenario that required my presence to an extent that I could not but head back to the Leaf, I must.

But only if he could find me.

I swore to myself, on the graves of my teammates, that I would kill Hoshigaki Kisame with his own weapon.

With the Sword.

It was Tenten's legacy, a long, well-made katana that shone bright, could not channel chakra, had no seals on it, rusted unless I polished it, was entirely inferior to Samehada.

But I had drive. It was Tenten's sword. And I would stab him through his gills with, while wearing one of Lee's weights on my forearm.

This was written.

This was what Fate is made of, my unerring pursuit of the truth that no Dojutsu could give me.

Sasuke may have lost his family, but I had never had a family. The only people I had, had wormed their way into my heart after countless years of camaraderie. These bonds were stronger than family.

I was terrible with the sword.

I refused to use Konoha's Kenjutsu forms. I told myself that I would build my knowledge of the weapon from scratch.

The Hyuuga had always frowned on the use of weapons in battle - the Jyuuken, which I had mastered to a degree that shocked my elders, was quite a powerful weapon after all.

I closed my eyes for the first time in battle three years after I took up the sword.

It was a chunin level missing-nin. I still received missives from Konoha at that point and Naruto, who understood my need to test my mettle, sent me after opponents who slowly increased in difficulty over time.

It was certainly a bad idea. I discovered this when a kunai tore into my thigh.

I grit my teeth. I was not used to pain - I barely ever got hurt in battles.

_If I take one more kunai wound, I will cut down one hundred trees in a forest. And if I cannot cut down one hundred trees in a forest, I will run around the forest two hundred times._

I blocked the next kunai with my blade. And the next. And the next. As I drew closer, the chunin panicked and tried to raise a wall of mud against me. I backhanded it with Lee's weight, spraying earth everywhere. The sound of the splattering mud gave away the chunin's position. I jumped, as precisely as I could, landing besides the chunin who was winded from throwing his whole collection of kunai.

I sliced the chunin into bloody halves and opened my eyes.

I was covered in the blood of my enemy and Hyuuga was spurting out of my thigh. I was at peace.

I cut down the hundred trees in the nearest forest anyway.

"Neji."

I started. No one had called me by that name in a very long time.

I turned and stared in the direction of the voice, but there was no one.

"Neji."

I bit. "Who's there?"

There was no answer.

I was annoyed.

_Neji_.

The voice was coming from my sword.

This was absurd. Never had I ever channeled chakra through it. Even if I had, I was not Senju Hashirama, or the Sage himself. I could not grow things. I was not a seal master, an artificer of intelligence taken form.

_Make me strong_.

My sword was already strong, this was absurd. My sword was powered by my body, by my mind, my drive, my determination.

_Make me stronger than Samehada_.

There was no voice. It was all in my head. I was crazy.

Oh. I was crazy. That made a ton of sense. Was it like this for Uchiha Sasuke? A voice in his kunai, from his _eyes_, maybe, telling him to kill his older brother?

_Test my mettle_.

I glared at nothing in particular.

_I need you to understand…_

I stared at the sword.

_This is only the beginning._

I stuck the sword into the ground and backed away from it slowly.

_But I'm not in your sword. I'm in you_.

I walked forwards and drew it from the ground in a sharp motion. Tenten's Legacy would not be sullied by the ground due to my instability.

I walked on.

And so it went for the longest time, which I had lost track of long ago.

"Have you ever seen a blade dance?"

It was juvenile, pathetic, even for a grown man to ask questions like that. It was a taunt, it infuriated people. But I was a ninja at heart.

"Hyuuga Neji."

She was some sort of infiltration specialist, perhaps even a seduction specialist. My uncle used to tell stories about how he had resisted them on his various missions.

Her voice was resigned. Perhaps she thought she would sneak up on me?

"You're worth quite a bit in the Bingo Books, missing-nin of Konoha."

Oh how incensed I was. She said Konoha as if it were the lowest of the low. As if it didn't exist, as if anything would have been better than the Leaf.

"Boys," she said dismissively. "So easy to play with your emotions."

"Everyone bleeds." It was one of the first things I learned. There was no one in the world who didn't lose blood, spray sweat and drip tears, from street rat to daimyo.

My sword flashed. _Clang_.

It cut into the kunai she blocked it with, an angry nick that didn't quite go through it. I saw the strain in her arm.

My sword danced to a rhythm that I did not quite hear myself. My grip switched multiple times. It was an elaborate test, one that would determine if she was worth death by my blade.

The kunoichi performed admirably. I might have misjudged her.

I sliced a fireball in half, much to her consternation. It was a better idea to use Lightning or Earth against me.

_Clang_.

_Clang_.

_Clang_.

_Kill her_.

_Clang._

_Clang._

Kill_ her_.

I did not oblige the sword. She had not shown me what I needed to know about her. She had not shown me her great power.

The kunoichi panted and stepped back, losing ground as my katana hemmed her in.

"Fight me. For real. Come at me with the intent to kill."

She glared at me, a trace of panic in her eyes.

"Is there nothing you can do?"

She blocked my swing again.

"No bloodline limit? No highly ranked technique?"

She glared twice as intensely as she did earlier and abruptly, I sheathed the sword.

"You are not worth my time. Your blood does not belong on the sword."

"I'm an assassination specialist," she said quietly. She must have been quite tired. "I don't need anything but a kunai. I've collected hundreds of bounties."

I knocked her out with a slight tap to the back of her neck. She dropped to the ground, snoring.

I cracked open a copy of the most recent Bingo Book that I found, sealed, in her vest.

I flipped through the genin section, which was basically a list of names and photographs amounting to a missing-persons list rather than actual threats. I slowed down as I flipped through the chunin, C rank, then sped up again. She was clearly beyond a fresh chunin in ability.

Now the pages were starting to get more detailed - up to three nin a page, with multiple pictures, some drawings and ability descriptions. These were the Special Jonin and more powerful Chunin, dominating B rank. It seems as though Kumo had a lot of deserters nowadays, with the death of the Hachibi's container convincing them that their village could provide them with no more safety.

I couldn't find me.

So, A rank, then.

_Hyuuga Neji, nin of former Konoha. _My hands clenched over the book. Former Konoha?

It was time to go home. I left the B-ranked assassin, from Sunakagure of all places, with a pair of ration bars tucked into her shirt.

I had avoided the border to Fire Country and Wave Country for so many years. It only felt right now, to walk along that calm water broken by little pulls of the bright moon. My father had told me that the moon was responsible for the motions of the sea. I cherished every word I remembered.

Konoha was in a sad state.

There was a single watchtower. There were no walls.

But there were three S-rank nin.

I thought of the floating words in seedy bars, talking about how a hawk had flown home to roost, at last.

Hatake Kakashi, the copy-nin.

Uchiha Sasuke, the last, finally loyal, son of the Fire.

And Uzumaki Naruto, a star so bright that even in my youth, his ascent burned my all-seeing eyes.

And that wasn't all. We had grown in a time of war, a time of unmatched companionship. I wondered briefly if I would have been S-rank too, if my team had lived, if I hadn't devoted myself to the blade.

The Taijutsu strike came so quickly, and from such a strange angle, that had I not pushed myself to the limit in order to sense incoming attacks, my head would have been knocked clean off.

Still, the hit had jarred my arm, despite the heavy block from Lee's weight. Perhaps the only thing that saved my arm from a clean break was the fact that they had the propensity to absorb some chakra. It was, after all, a gift made to even the playing field for my late teammate from Gai-sensei, to defeat some lightning attacks, to crush walls of earth, to block the ever-gentle, never-forgiving fist of his teammate.

To stop me from hurting him too much.

I managed to dodge the next hits with some difficulty, and I caught a strand of pink hair streaming from within the hood.

"Haruno-san."

She paused, then continued her attack anew.

"It is I, Neji."

With an amazing feat of control, her fist stopped a mere millimeter from my weights and she dropped into a crouching stance meant to block everything but the easy-to-read high attacks from Taijutsu specialists.

"Prove it."

"Byakugan."

I had not used it in a while, and I could see traces of a black substance in her lungs and running through her bloodstream. Her chakra which would have normally fought it, and generally ran within the blood in small amounts, had been neatly partitioned to allow the filth to pollute her brain.

"Are you… affected… by some _medicinal_ substance?" I asked incredulously.

To my surprise, she giggled softly. "Maybe," she drawled.

"You… were on patrol… of some sort." I could not comprehend the magnitude of the irresponsibility before my eyes.

Abruptly, the chakra snapped into the black substance and filtered it out. She glared and her movements became a lot less choppy.

"It doesn't quite impair my speed, nor does it stop me from punching Hyuuga missing-nin so hard that their chests explode."

My glare was intensified by the Byakugan. "Just take me to Naruto."

"As you can see, he's sleeping."

I glanced at the 'village' again and, indeed, Uzumaki Naruto was on a bed, his chest rising and falling rhythmically.

Without another word, I let her grab me by the shoulder and activate a body-flicker which brought us to the top of the watchtower.

It stank of opium and sake. In a second, she was perched on a makeshift seat, created from a wooden crate and her pipe was in her hand.

I sighed and deactivated my Byakugan.

I didn't know what I had come back to, but it certainly wasn't something good.

"The Akatsuki is gutted. Madara is dead. Why is Konoha still _here_?"

A glazed look had entered Sakura's eyes. She giggled again.

"Neji-kun. Our greatest fear is not that we are weak… but that we are… immeasurably powerful."


End file.
